The invention relates to a protective switch having an actuation side. The protective switch includes a base having walls, a pivot shaft connected to the walls of the base, and a switching rocker pivotal on the pivot shaft to be pivotally seated on the base. The switching rocker includes two lever arms for switching the protective switch on and off. A housing is placed on the base and protectively surrounds the switching rocker. A housing cover is located on the actuation side of the protective switch and protectively covers the switching rocker. The housing cover includes an opening therethrough. A plurality of hinges are each disposed on a respective lever arm of the switching rocker. An actuation attachment extends through the opening of the housing cover and is modularly connected to the switching rocker by the hinges for pivoting the switching rocker.
Such protective switches are known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,083,027 and from GB 745 744. The protective switches have a bimetal-controlled switching mechanism for switching the protective switch off in case of an excess current. The switching mechanism is hingedly connected with a switching rocker. It is embodied as a two-armed lever. Each one of the two lever arms is hingedly connected with a separate switch button. The switching mechanism can be controlled via the switching rocker by pressure actuation of the switch buttons. In this way the protective switch can be manually switched on or off as required.
For reasons of technical safety, however, it may be necessary to provide the switching rocker with only one switch button, so that the protective switch can only be switched on manually, but not switched off.
In case of a change in the order of a client it can also be necessary not to equip the switching rocker with two switch buttons and instead to be able to actuate it as a one-piece element directly for switching the protective switch on and off. Protective switches with such a switching rocker are known from DE 29 28 277 C2 (=U.S. Pat. No. 4,329,669) and from DE 27 21 162 C2. The bimetal-controlled protective switches known from these publications can be manually switched on and off by means of the one-piece switching rocker projecting out of the housing cover.
However, these known switches are disadvantageous in that, with a change in the order of the client regarding the design and actuation of the switching rocker, it may be necessary to replace the entire protective switch, because all known protective switches have either only a one-piece switching rocker or a switching rocker with two separate switch buttons. Accordingly, components of the protective switch are also replaced which actually could have remained, such as the entire switching mechanism. The replacement of the switching rocker is therefore very expensive.